Monday, January 12th, 2009

Time	Event
11:24a	TV makers seek depth, adding a third dimension LAS VEGAS (AP) — This year, superficial was out at the nation's largest electronics gala. Every exhibitor at the International Consumer Electronics Show, it seemed, wanted to show some depth. Depth as in 3-D, that is. Home theaters, webcams, live TV and even iPhone-sized screens — nothing escaped the 3-D treatment. "There's three or more times more 3-D than last year," said Richard Doherty, an analyst with Envisioneering Group. But will consumers care? Three-dimensional movies have been around since the '50s, and now and then companies try to get people interested by broadening the use of the technology. This time, the breadth of the industry's push suggests that 3-D has a chance of leaving the gimmick stage and entering the entertainment mainstream. When it comes to home viewing, the technology has cleared an important technical hurdle. Flat-panel TVs now can switch between images so quickly that they can be used with glasses that let each eye see only every other image. That means different images can be presented to the right and left eyes, the key to achieving stereoscopic vision, or 3-D. Panasonic Corp. demonstrated a plasma screen at CES that showed animated movies and Olympics footage in high-definition 3-D to viewers wearing battery-powered glasses that imperceptibly blacked out the view for each eye in an alternating fashion. Yoshi Yamada, head of Panasonic Corp.'s North American unit, called it "a phase change that will have a major impact on Panasonic's business." The rest of the top four makers of TVs for the U.S. market — Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Corp. and LG Electronics Inc. — also had 3-D TVs at their booths. The reason, Doherty said, is that the industry's drive to make larger and larger screens has run up against the limits of what people are willing to buy. To keep people interested in new TVs, the manufacturers need something else. But all the 3-D TVs on displays were prototypes with no firm launch date. That's because there's a step missing in the 3-D formula. It's not hard to shoot in 3-D, and it's no longer hard to display it at home. But there is no widely accepted way to get the footage from the studio to the home. There are no 3-D discs and no 3-D broadcasts. Panasonic wants to solve that problem this year by creating standards for both broadcasts and discs, probably with some variation of the high-definition Blu-ray disc. The goal is to get products on the market by next year, Yamada said. That would require the cooperation of Hollywood studios, and it's not clear they are on board. Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., said the studio now makes all its movies in 3-D, and thinks that transition is as important as the one from black-and-white to color. But home viewing is not first on his mind. Instead, 3-D "represents the opportunity to re-energize our audiences worldwide about the film medium, to give them a new exciting premium experience that can only be seen in the movie theaters," Katzenberg said. To promote 3-D screenings of its next animated feature, "Monsters vs. Aliens," DreamWorks will be giving away 150 million 3-D glasses before it runs a 90-second ad at the Super Bowl. For a 3-D effect on unmodified TV sets, the glasses use an updated version of the old technique of using a red filter over one eye and an blue one over the other. Glasses are still necessary for all the 3-D TV prototypes that were at CES. But 3M Co. and partner Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Co., a leading maker of screens for cell phones and MP3 players, were showing off small screens that do not require glasses for a 3-D effect. The key to the technology is a thin film made by 3M, the company behind Post-It notes and Scotch tape. The film beams light selectively to the right and left eyes of the viewer. The idea is somewhat similar to the old postcards that produced a 3-D effect by bending light with a thick, ribbed plastic covering. But 3M's new film goes inside the screen, and is invisible to the viewer. The 3-D effect can be turned off at the flick of a switch, leaving a display indistinguishable from the one on Apple Inc.'s iPhone. The film will be on the market this year, said 3M senior technology manager William Bryan. If manufacturers are willing, that could mean 3-D phones by Christmas, but just as with 3-D TV, there's a chicken-and-egg problem with introducing small 3-D displays. "The content people haven't been willing to do a lot of content because there have been no displays," Bryan said. The exception, however, is computer games. Most games are already rendered in three dimensions, so they'll appear in 3-D on the proper display. As a result, Andrew Fear, senior product manager at Nvidia Corp.'s 3-D business, said he expects games to "drive the 3-D industry." Nvidia, one of the two leading makers of graphics chips for PCs and game consoles, showed off its new $199 GeForce 3D Vision glasses at CES. Used with compatible high-end LCD monitors, they make more than 350 existing games — such as "Spore" and the zombie-fighting game "Left 4 Dead" — deepen into the screen. In some specially modified games, like "World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King," objects even appear to pop out of the screen, so you can duck that sword. The quirkiest 3-D product of the show was the $90 Minoru 3D webcam, which attaches to a PC. It has two lenses, spaced as if they were eyes. Software combines the images captured by the lenses and sends them through standard Web videoconferencing software like Skype and Windows Live Messenger. The catch is that the viewer needs glasses of the old red-and-blue kind, so the person in front of the webcam will be in 3-D, but the wrong colors. Also, for a two-way 3-D chat, both participants need to wear colored glasses. Clearly, some manufacturers will go to great lengths to provide a 3-D experience. "I believe 3-D is the next big wave coming to the consumer electronics industry," said LG's chief technology officer, Woo Paik.       (Comment on this)
11:25a	Sometimes Even the Good Games Die Young During the course of advancement in any market, the strong survive and the weak perish, in the PC game market this is well known by many, especially MMO gamers These days, massively multiplayer games seem to dominate in the realm of PC gaming, but it has been a long road, with many casualties. Most MMO's from the olden days are still online in one form or another, but a few have been buried by the companies that launched them. The reasons for their discontinuation stems from a variety of reasons, but one thing is for sure, it’s the fans that got left out in the cold. For them, the days of the game world they once played in are over, with no way to return. These days, the proliferation of player run servers for World of Warcraft, Everquest, and other games means they will never truly die, but for some games, that wasn't possible at the time they went offline. Some of these games still have followings from the PC gaming community, but many have since moved on. In one odd instance, there is a game that died as it was, and was reborn into something very different. This was the case for Star Wars Galaxies players. The open universe they grew to know, was removed, and replaced with something more akin to Everquest and other traditional class based MMORPG's. While this move might have been a good choice to attract more mainstream players, it caused many longtime players to leave in pursuit of greener pastures elsewhere. Another game, which that I played back in the day was from a once popular studio known as Westwood. They developed Earth & Beyond, one of the first space-based MMO's. For its time the game was fun, well made, and had a decent story that could have made a real legacy for itself had it continued. Before the release of E&B, Westwood was purchased by EA, and attempted to run with E&B much the same way Verant had made a hit out of Everquest. After a year of struggle and small success, EA had decided that E&B would not be the hit they were looking for and decided to focus on The Sims Online. The thought at the time was that The Sims was a smash hit PC title, and that bringing your Sims online into a massive neighborhood would be extremely popular. Plans were drawn up to close E&B and to allocate its resources to furthering The Sims Online. The playerbase dropped by a sizable margin when this was announced, and just 2 years after Earth & Beyond went live, it shuttered its doors. Ironically just four years later, The Sims Online would also be shut down due to lack of a sizeable playerbase and revenue stream. For diehard Earth & Beyond fans, however, hope may yet live on in the E&B Emulator Project, which is progressing nicely and has big plans for reviving the days of Earth & Beyond in the 21st Century. As for fans of The Sims Online, your best bet these days rests with The Sims 2 and its prolific expansion packs. A recent addition to the graveyard is a new game from NCSoft, Tabula Rasa. Launched in November of 2007, it was another Sci-Fi styled game with a unique story. In this universe, Earth was invaded and some survived by fleeing to another planet via ancient technology found on Earth. The game also doubled as a First/Third person shooter combined with its RPG aspects to form a truly unique MMO. It was announced that Tabula Rasa is closing its doors on February 28th 2009. While this short lived MMO will be missed you can play Tabula Rasa for free until its termination date. MMO's are some of the most involved and long running PC games, where communities mingle and cooperate in ways not seen in other genres. Whenever one goes offline the players suffer, as the virtual world they have invested their time and effort into is no more. But most MMO players simply shift gears into the next MMO they want to immerse themselves in and start anew.       (Comment on this)
11:27a	Leigh Alexander, News Director of Gamasutra, Talks Free-To-Play Adrian Crook is a game industry veteran who heads up Compulsion Loop - a design consultancy focused on the free-to-play and core game sectors. This article originally appeared on Crook’s blog, FreeToPlay.biz, and has been reprinted here with his permission. Original Article Leigh’s been a friend of F2P.biz since its inception, when she was kind enough to run several of our articles on the site she managed at the time, Worlds in Motion (a Gamasutra “sister” site). Since then, Leigh spent some time at Kotaku before rejoining the Gamasutra family as News Director of the main site, Gamasutra.com. Leigh recently gave us some of her time at Austin GDC, doing an excellent video interview that fell victim to random audio difficulties. But because the content of that interview was too good to let die, we conducted a written interview with Leigh after the show. Here is that interview: You are a well known commentator on the virtual world space.  How did that happen, how did you get to where you are today? Haha, I am? I guess that’s one of the benefits of getting in somewhat early in a space that emerged quickly and got a lot of people excited about it. I was fortunate to be chosen by Simon Carless as the first editor of Gamasutra’s sister site Worlds in Motion focusing on online worlds, and I suppose I learned a lot by covering the space and talking to the people who are pioneering it.  I also planned the inaugural Worlds in Motion Summit at GDC in February 2008, and while I didn’t have a hand in the track you saw this year in Austin, a lot of the ideas came from there. How was the Worlds in Motion Summit this year? It was good! Austin was sort of an interesting climate for it, because surprisingly some of the presentations I thought of as “Worlds in Motion’s Arena” were taking place across the board during the main conference. I’d hoped that some of the concepts and methodologies finding success in online social spaces would start proliferating across the game space, but I’m surprised it’s happened so quickly! Still, I think we brought some unique stuff to the table. What were the big issues and stories in the MMO/Virtual World space in 2008? It seems to me like 2007 was the year that a lot of people, from investors to developers to consumers, realized we had a full-fledged phenomenon on our hands. This year, I think, is the year that a lot of fledgling products will be tested. As we’re looking at what’s launching successfully and what’s not, and what’s taking off and what’s foundering, I think the biggest issue is for individual products to evaluate their substance a bit and perhaps specialize their focus a little. For a while, I think a lot of us operated under the idea that having the word “social” in your product description was enough, and now, I think a lot of these online spaces, even if they operate wholly in a “free” environment — free to play, driven by user-generated content, and free of any kind of video game linearity, are seeing that they do need some kind of backbone in structure, and for that they look back to the game industry. We’re also seeing a quality bump start happening, I think. For example, even looking at Facebook, at first a Facebook user could get about a billion requests to add apps per day — now that the user’s maybe tried one too many “advertising in disguise” games, or one too many low-quality apps, the industry is having to adapt to a savvier user for whom all this is not so new. One of the ways in which new entries to the social gaming space can differentiate themselves is by presenting a really polished experience that’s clearly grounded in good game design. So virtual worlds are starting to look to more game structures, and social/casual games are starting to look to more traditional quality levels, and traditional MMOs are now seeing how crucial social elements can be, adding the ability for gamers to dance and make music together. Just today, I believe, I saw an announcement that PopCap is adding a Bejeweled-style game to WoW, because sometimes even hardcore players would like that casual social experience. So there’s a lot of cross-pollination now. What do you see as the big trends that will emerge in the MMO/Virtual World space in 2009? I hope that the cross-pollination will continue, wisely. At first there was a lot of excitement around certain key concepts, and what I saw as a rush to implement them, and now I think the trend will favor a disciplined and appropriate implementation of things like social elements and alternative revenue streams, or asynchronous options for multi-user environments — because as Raph Koster said in a panel at AGDC, new products need to tailor their approach a bit to how people are already using the web. I think we’ll see a lot more of that. And strictly speaking on the MMO space, with World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold  ) in the position it’s in, and with MMOs such a high-risk and volatile space, I think that traditional online game companies making MMOs are increasingly challenged to find real staying power in the space, to hang in long enough to actually make some money and develop a user community, and they’re going to need to get more creative — I think they’re going to start looking to these emerging trends a bit more to differentiate themselves. What are the major challenges Virtual Spaces feature before they can truly go mainstream? The major challenge is how we define virtual spaces! As I said, I think a lot of people are excited about “virtualization” without having yet a standardized idea — or even a clear idea — of what exactly this means, and what it’d look like, and who its users will be, and where we ought to apply it and where we ought not to. We have all the ingredients for mainstream success — browser-based interfaces that anyone can access, low barrier to entry in design that focuses, as Raph Koster said, on the everyday web user, and we even have mainstream cultural penetration. Your average consumer is already getting hands-on experience with multi-user, web-based interaction via Facebook and MySpace, which are now household names, and even something much more traditional like World of Warcraft is the stuff of evening TV. People are now wholly familiar with and comfortable with paying for things online, with having a user ID, with playing casual games. These things have penetrated our cultural fabric, and we’ve got the city all built to receive the new occupants, but I think where we’re challenged right now is finding a broad implementation that’s beneficial to others beyond those who have already adopted it. We’ll be successful at that when we implement online visual spaces, and avatar-based interaction, for example, in areas where it’s a definitive and clear enhancement on the way we already do things. Do you think the free-to-play business model is now accepted by the North American mainstream?  In the West, its adoption has, at times, been met with suspicion and reluctance.  Are we past that and if not how do we get there? I think the suspicion and reluctance originates primarily in the core video game community, and with designers who have come from a video game or pure MMO background. When games are free to play, they monetize in one of three ways, or a mix of the three: Through paid-for virtual items, through advertising, or through tiered subscriptions. Strictly looking at these options from a game perspective, each of them could possibly unbalance or degrade the gameplay. For example, with microtransactions, players will likely only spend money on items that have an enhancing effect on their gameplay. So basically, the fear is that paying users will be able to have game advantages that non-paying users don’t. There’s the same suspicion of tiered subscriptions, a fear (that has been borne out in reality, somewhat) that the free players are being “ghettoized,” treated as less valuable by the game operator or simply having a much more limited game experience. In both of these cases, yes, there is a free option, but not paying becomes a penalty in the context of a gameplay experience. From the designer’s perspective, allowing users to be able to buy game enhancements becomes really challenging, because they need to keep the game balanced in order to make it enjoyable to all, and to achieve this they’re suddenly tasked with managing a highly complex economy, something they might not have bargained for. There’s always some core gamer resistance to advertising, as well — the vocal core of the game audience is very sensitive to integrity and will lash out against games they see as selling out to brands. This audience, I think, will never get “past” it. They have declared quite clearly their desires and expectations from their game experience and I think that there should continue to be products that address that. But there’s a broad userbase that exists outside the hardcore gamer, believe it or not! That’s something that it’s hard to be aware of, acclimated as we are to a sort of “internet gamer community.” The people that we see the most often, and that are part of our most immediate culture, are not necessarily the largest percentage of the consumer population. Just as concerns advertising, there’s been research done that finds that there’s a kind of consumer that would like brands in their online spaces, to enhance realism. There’s a kind of consumer that would prefer to pay in RMTs instead of subscriptions, and the current generation of kids and teens is growing up in an area where everything on the internet is free, period. They’re going to continue to expect that. So the traditional audience might be hostile to a new way of doing things, but my impression is we’re implementing some of these new concepts with the primary aim of welcoming in a new audience.   (Comment on this)

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